


A Rose for Michael

by flatlovenotes



Category: A Rose for Emily - William Faulkner, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Adaptation, M/M, Mikey Way - Freeform, Victorian era, William Faulkner - Freeform, alternative universe, my chemical romance - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:20:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28373046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flatlovenotes/pseuds/flatlovenotes
Summary: "For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust."





	A Rose for Michael

**Author's Note:**

> A silly adaptation of "A Rose for Emily", by William Faulkner, for I have no creativity to make a story of my own. All credits goes to the respective author.
> 
> I chose Mikey to portray Emily Grierson in this short story because he's quite underrated and he also died in The Ghost of You. Yes, very stupid, but i appreciate him very, very much. That's it. Enjoy 💋

When Mr Michael Way died, our whole town went to his funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of his house, which no one, save an old man-servant — a combined gardener and cook — had seen in at least ten years.  
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Mr Michael's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Mr Michael had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery, among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Mr Michael had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor — he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted his taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of his father on into perpetuity. Not that Mr Way would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Mr Way's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed him a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking him to call at the sheriff's office at his convenience. A week later the mayor wrote his himself, offering to call or to send his car for him, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that he no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.  
They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon him, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since he ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse — a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Mr Michael's father.

They rose when he entered — a tall, lean man in black, with a thin gold chain descending to his waist and vanishing into his belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. His skeleton was small but spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely slimness in another was emaciation in him. He looked bloated although, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. His eyes, lost in the bony ridges of his face, looked like two big pieces of dark ember sculptured into a silky lump as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.  
He did not ask them to sit. He just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.  
His voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves."  
"But we have. We are the city authorities, Mr Way. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?"  
"I received a paper, yes," Mr Michael said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff... I have no taxes in Jefferson."  
"But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see, we must go by the–"  
"See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson."  
"But, Mr Way–"  
"See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."

II.  
So he vanquished them, horse and foot, just as he had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.  
That was two years after his father's death and a short time after his sweetheart, the one we believed would marry him, had deserted him. After his father's death he went out very little; after his sweetheart went away, people hardly saw him at all. A few of the gentleman had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man, a young man then, going in and out with a market basket.  
"Just as if a man, any man, could keep a kitchen properly," the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Ways.

A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.  
"But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said.  
"Why, send him word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? "  
"I'm sure that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that scoundrel of his killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."  
The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Mr Michael, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met — three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.  
"It's simple enough," he said. "Send him word to have his place cleaned up. Give him a certain time to do it in, and if he don't..."  
"Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a gentleman to his face of smelling bad?"  
So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Mr Way's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Mr Way sat in it, the light behind him, and his upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for him. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, his great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Ways held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the gentlemen were quite good enough for Mr Michael and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Mr Michael a slender figure in white in the background, his father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to Michael's and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when he got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family he wouldn't have turned down all of his chances if they had really materialized.

When his father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to him; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Mr Way. Being left alone, and a pauper, he had become humanized. Now he too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.

The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Mr Way met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on his face. He told them that his father was not dead. He did that for three days, with the ministers calling on him, and the doctors, trying to persuade him to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, he broke down, and they buried his father quickly.

We did not say he was crazy then. We believed he had to do that. We remembered all the young men his father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, he would have to cling to that which had robbed him, as people will.

III.  
H  
~~~

When Mr Michael Way died, our whole town went to his funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of his house, which no one, save an old man-servant — a combined gardener and cook — had seen in at least ten years.  
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Mr Michael's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Mr Michael had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery, among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

Alive, Mr Michael had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor — he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted his taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of his father on into perpetuity. Not that Mr Way would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Mr Way's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed him a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking him to call at the sheriff's office at his convenience. A week later the mayor wrote his himself, offering to call or to send his car for him, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that he no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment.  
They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon him, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since he ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse — a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Mr Michael's father.

They rose when he entered — a tall, lean man in black, with a thin gold chain descending to his waist and vanishing into his belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. His skeleton was small but spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely slimness in another was emaciation in him. He looked bloated although, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. His eyes, lost in the bony ridges of his face, looked like two big pieces of dark ember sculptured into a silky lump as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.  
He did not ask them to sit. He just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.  
His voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves."  
"But we have. We are the city authorities, Mr Way. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?"  
"I received a paper, yes," Mr Michael said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff... I have no taxes in Jefferson."  
"But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see, we must go by the–"  
"See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson."  
"But, Mr Way–"  
"See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out."

II.  
So he vanquished them, horse and foot, just as he had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.  
That was two years after his father's death and a short time after his sweetheart, the one we believed would marry him, had deserted him. After his father's death he went out very little; after his sweetheart went away, people hardly saw him at all. A few of the gentleman had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man, a young man then, going in and out with a market basket.  
"Just as if a man, any man, could keep a kitchen properly," the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Ways.

A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old.  
"But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said.  
"Why, send him word to stop it," the woman said. "Isn't there a law? "  
"I'm sure that won't be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "It's probably just a snake or a rat that scoundrel of his killed in the yard. I'll speak to him about it."  
The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. I'd be the last one in the world to bother Mr Michael, but we've got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met — three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation.  
"It's simple enough," he said. "Send him word to have his place cleaned up. Give him a certain time to do it in, and if he don't..."  
"Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a gentleman to his face of smelling bad?"  
So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Mr Way's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Mr Way sat in it, the light behind him, and his upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away.

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for him. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, his great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Ways held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the gentlemen were quite good enough for Mr Michael and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Mr Michael a slender figure in white in the background, his father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to Michael's and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when he got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family he wouldn't have turned down all of his chances if they had really materialized.

When his father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to him; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Mr Way. Being left alone, and a pauper, he had become humanized. Now he too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.

The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Mr Way met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on his face. He told them that his father was not dead. He did that for three days, with the ministers calling on him, and the doctors, trying to persuade him to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, he broke down, and they buried his father quickly.

We did not say he was crazy then. We believed he had to do that. We remembered all the young men his father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, he would have to cling to that which had robbed him, as people will.

III.  
He was sick for a long time. When we saw him again, his hair was long, making him look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows — sort of tragic and serene.

The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee — a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss others, and those singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Mr Way on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable.

At first we were glad that Mr Michael would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of course a Way would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige, without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Michael. His kinsfolk should come to him." He had some kin in Alabama; but years ago his father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral.

And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Michael," the whispering began. "Do you suppose it's really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could..." This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Michael."

He carried his head high enough, even when we believed that he was fallen. It was as if he demanded more than ever the recognition of his dignity as the last Way; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm his imperviousness. Like when he bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say "Poor Michael," and while the two female cousins were visiting him.

"I want some poison," he said to the druggist. He was over thirty then, still a slight man, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty hazel eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," he said.  
"Yes, Mr Way. What kind? For rats and such? I'd recom–"  
"I want the best you have. I don't care what kind."  
The druggist named several. "They'll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is–"  
"Arsenic," Mr Way said. "Is that a good one?"  
"Is... arsenic? Yes, sir. But what you want–"  
"I want arsenic."  
The druggist looked down at him. He looked back at him, erect, his face like a strained flag. "Why, of course," the druggist said. "If that's what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for."  
Mr Way just stared at him, his head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The delivery boy brought him the package; the druggist didn't come back. When he opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats."

IV.  
So the next day we all said, "He will kill himself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When he had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "He will marry him." Then we said, "He will persuade him yet," because Homer himself had remarked — he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club — that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, "Poor Michael" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Mr Wat with his head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove.  
Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister — Mr Way's people were Episcopal — to call upon him.   
He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Mr Michael's relations in Alabama.

So he had blood-kin under his roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Mr Michael had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that he had bought a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married." We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Way than Mr Michael had ever been.

So we were not surprised when Homer Barron — the streets had been finished some time since — was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Mr Way's coming, or to give him a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Mr Michael's allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.

And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Mr Way for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see him at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months he did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of his father which had thwarted his woman's life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.

When we next saw Mr Michael, he had grown fat and his hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of his death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.

From that time on his front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when he was about forty, during which he gave lessons in china-painting. He fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris' contemporaries were sent to him with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile his taxes had been remitted.

Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to his with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies' magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Mr Way alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above his door and attach a mailbox to it. He would not listen to them.  
Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent him a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see him in one of the downstairs windows (he had evidently shut up the top floor of the house) like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus je passed from generation to generation — dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.  
And so he died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on him. We did not even know he was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro  
He talked to no one, probably not even to him, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.

He died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, his gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

V.  
The Negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.  
The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Mr Way beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of his father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men — some in their brushed Confederate uniforms — on the porch and the lawn, talking of Mr Way as if he had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with him and courted him perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Mr Michael was decently in the ground before they it.  
The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks.

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.


End file.
